Although Météo-France has been
underestimating the violence of the winds, the prediction
for the days ahead foresees calmer weather for the coming
New Years' weekend.

Oil Spill Worsens

After tracking visible patches of oil last week, it is
now believed that oil hitting 400 kms of western French
beaches is leaking from the sunken tanker.

Last night's tempest hit the area most affected by the
oil spill, overwhelming the already overwhelmed clean-up
crowds of emergency workers, volunteers and despairing
fishermen.

Prime Minister Lionel Jospin will visit the site of the
disaster today, following the visit of the environment
minister, Dominique Voynet, on Sunday.

Read more in Sunday's report below:

Severe Storm Bats Paris

Oil Spill Hits French Beaches

Paris:- Sunday, 26. December 1999:- My
kitchen window has not blown open since I propped up a
chair against it to keep it closed during a windy cold
spell several weeks ago. This morning it was open
again.

The day after Christmas, a Sunday, and not a sound in
the house. To turn on noisy and irritating radio
France-Info or not?

When I did, it said catastrophe. No trains. Autoroutes
blocked. Airports closed. People killed. Roofs blown off,
construction cranes on the ground, thousands of trees
ripped out of the ground.

Out in my street, minor debris on the sidewalk. Bits of
tile from roofs, bits of twigs from trees, some broken
glass, and a couple of pieces of zinc building metal. At
the avenue, more of it; but all of the trees intact. No
real indication of what has recently happened.

Up on Montmartre I see an awning torn to pieces at the
Place du Tertre. Down towards métro Abbesses, a
building scaffolding is down with a BMW buried under its
wreckage.

I do not see a chimney of the Mairie of the 18th lying
in the Place Jules Joffrin in front of it. I do not see the
hundreds of trees uprooted in Paris. Some of this is shown
on the evening's TV-news.

Watching this is interrupted by the server-lady Linda
Thalman, phoning from the Cadillac Ranch in Essonne. She
has had power outages, has holes in the roof and says one
of her trees - ten years old - snapped in half. It's roots
held, but its trunk didn't.

The Tempest According To
Météo France

At this time of year, sharp gusts of wind up to 110 kph
are not uncommon. These were forecast for northern France
for Friday, with winds of force 8 or 9 expected off the
coast; with 90 to 130 kph predicted for Christmas
morning.

This wind, with waves up to ten metres high, accelerated
the arrival on the coast of the oil from the shipwrecked
tanker Erika.

What Météo France couldn't predict, was
the freefall of the barometre as soon as the winds touched
the Brittany and Normandy coasts. Instead of slowing down
the wind picked up velocity.

The hurricane-like winds swept across France in six
hours, confined to a narrow band, devastating everything in
the way. The Black Forest east of Alsace was hit like a
hammer. Bavaria and Austria, warned, were also heavily
damaged.

Many were killed. The estimated death toll for Europe is
more than 50, with eight in the Ile-de-France. Some had
chimneys collapse on them and others were crushed in their
cars by falling trees.

There were no fatalities in Paris. Three customs agents
escaped by seconds being crushed in their car by a falling
plane tree near Austerlitz.

Transport In a
Shambles

According the radio France-Info this morning, the only
rail traffic in operation was the northern TGVs and the
Eurostar trains. All Paris area suburban rail services were
suspended, and within the city métro line 13,
Chatillon to Saint-Denis, was shut down. RER operations
ceased almost entirely.

Both Paris airports at Roissy and Orly, after being shut
entirely for four hours this morning, later operated
with only one runway, mainly to receive long-haul
arrivals.

The western A13 autoroute from Paris to Normandy was
closed, with more than 200 fallen trees on it. Many other
roads, both in Paris and in the countryside, were blocked
by downed power lines and fallen trees.

Under the
scaffolding, a BMW.

Many travellers who were trying to return to Paris after
Christmas were stranded around France by the SNCF's first
total shutdown.

Thousands were stranded at alpine stations and 5000 were
blocked at Lyon. In the afternoon, attempts to run trains
from Rennes and Nantes to Paris were abandoned due to
unreliable power supplies.

The SNCF arranged as much accommodation as it could
find; even using its own sleeping wagons. Emergency
lodgings were set up to handle the overflow.

This evening, a third of Paris' métro lines were
not operating. The RER lines B, C, D and Méteor were
also out of action.

Electricity Cuts, Floods and
Chaos

Millions of homes in the path of the tempest had their
electricity cut by collapsed transmission towers and lines
downed by the gusts or falling trees. Tonight, more than a
million households are still without power. In various
areas, flooding occurred, to add to the chaos.

In a snap estimate, the city of Paris said half the
trees in the Bois de Boulogne had been damaged. At the
Château de Versailles, 4,000 trees were thought to
have been uprooted - and the château was closed
today.

Disneyland-Paris was closed today on account of damage
caused by the storm. Visitors lived two hours in terror in
the park's chalets and hotels as trees fell like
matchsticks around them.

The Paris brigade of sapeurs-pompiers were called out
4800 times. Many tall construction cranes collapsed.
Residents near those that remained standing feared that
they wouldn't withstand the gusts.

Although not as strong, further strong winds are
expected. Many building bits and pieces of Paris still in
place have been weakened, so there is a constant danger of
more coming down.

This warning was not carried by radio France-Info at
noon today. Visitors and residents alike were seen touring
the city without realizing the possible danger.

The evening's TV-news showed impressive scenes of
destruction. A construction crane tore a neighboring
apartment building apart when it collapsed, and residents
feared other nearby cranes.

Paris' big 60-metre high wheel at Concorde withstood the
wind as did the other 21 smaller ferris wheels on the
Champs-Elysées.

The Other Chaos

The tanker Erika sank on Sunday, 12. December. Since
this time a small fleet from all over Europe and a
mid-sized army of tanker-spill experts have been working
non-stop to prevent the spill from touching the coast of
France.

Despite all efforts of so many and thanks to the storm
winds, the pollution began to hit the beaches late on
Friday - days earlier than feared.

With the storm, the black sludge not only hit the
beaches, but was also splattered over houses near them.

After weeks of attempts to pump the oil out of the sea,
after weeks of preparing barriers to hold it at bay, after
weeks of calculating when and where it would touch the
coast, the storm upset everything. For a long time, the oil
was concentrated in a few patches. 'Concentrated' has a
double meaning, because it was too thick to be pumped from
the sea with available equipment.

Equipment that is able to do it is scarce. By the time
it arrived on the scene, the winds and the high seas had
made the trip unnecessary.

Then the chance of wind did the rest. An army of
professionals, fishermen, and volunteers have been waiting
for the rogue oil to arrive - from Finistère in
Brittany, all the way down to the oyster beds at the
Sables-d'Olonne and the Ile d'Oléron in
Charente-Maritime.

Until a few days ago, this latter area seemed to be the
likely target. The big wind instead blew the sludge
northwest, to land it on a 400-kilometre section of the
coast, beginning in the area of Quimper and ranging down to
bay of Bourgneuf, just west of Nantes.

Since the shipwreck of the Erika, 10,000 birds have been
recovered and de-oiled. Interviewed on radio France-Info, a
fisherman noted that the vast effort to save birds was
laudable - so long as a similar effort was made to save the
livelihood of thousands of fishermen.

At Le Crosic, west of Nantes, volunteers who turned up
to clean the beaches had to bring their own equipment. This
proved insufficient and they were sent home.

One was reported to have said that 'France is in the
stone-age of marine defense,' and since the catastrophic
oil-spill of the Amoco-Cadiz in 1978, 'nothing has been
learned.'

TV-news showed volunteer beach cleaners with shovels,
trying to pick up huge gobs of gooey oil. Buckets filled
with it, seemed to have as much on their outsides as
inside. The stuff is so thick it can't be poured out of the
buckets.

As far as the birds go, of those recovered only about 30
percent will be saved. There isn't enough manpower to
de-oil them by hand.

A good part of the area affected gains its livelihood
from fishing, oysters, other shellfish and from tourism. The head of TotalFina, owner of the
oil, was on TV last week, to say that indemnities would be
paid quickly.

With the Amoco-Cadiz affair, it took nearly two decades
of court action, to get the oil company to assume
responsibility.

No more moules, no more paella?

Another worry is the oil remaining in the sunken tanker,
which broke in two. In previous cases where oil was pumped
out of wreck on the bottom of the sea, the cost was
astronomical and took years.

Since the big oil-spillages of 20 years ago, oil
companies now contribute to an industry insurance fund,
which is supposed to pay off fairly quickly for pollution
damage. In this case, the bill could be billions of
francs.

But while the oil pollution is here and now, fishermen
in the affected area will not be sending much in the way of
fresh seafood to the markets in Paris.

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